Ask a Dude: Episode 2, Part 1

Episode 2, Part 1

Nick discusses the different types of shame men experience and the common response to it.


Music by Pixabay.com

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Ask a Dude: Episode 2 Part 1

Emmy Graham: In 2020, I met Nick Oredson, a skilled facilitator who specializes in working with trauma and abuse. I started talking to him about the abuse, harm and harassment I’ve encountered throughout my life at the hands of men, specifically, and the damaging impact it’s had on me. To my surprise, he didn’t flinch – he just took in what I had to say and validated my experience. This was astonishing to me because in my experience, whenever I attempted to speak to men about abuse or demeaning behavior, their response has typically been to diminish my feelings or its impact, shout out in some kind of strange rage, or clam up completely and retreat to silence. I’d never had the experience of a man simply listening and taking in my perspective, until Nick. 

In time, I began to ask him questions about why men behave in certain ways in certain circumstances. No topic was off limits. He would access what he referred to as the collective male consciousness of shadow masculinity that all men are taught to adhere to, in order to answer my questions as best as he could. We jokingly referred to it as our ‘Ask a Dude’ sessions and I found them so helpful that I suggested he should set up a table on a street corner somewhere with a sign reading “Ask me anything about men” so women could come to him with their baffling questions about men.

That’s how this podcast started. We are a group of three women and we come together with a list of questions for Nick to address. This is not rehearsed. He has no idea what we will ask. 

Ask A Dude - three women, one guy – where we get real answers on subjects most men aren’t willing to talk about. This is Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham. 

Emmy: Hello, this is Emmy Graham with Sacred Truths and we are back with “Ask a Dude” and we have our dude, again today, as Nick, hi Nick. 

Nick: Howdy, good to be here.

Emmy: And we have a panel of three women: myself, and we have Heather, hi Heather

Heather: Hello. Hello everyone. 

Emmy: Hi, Deborah.

Deborah: Good afternoon. 

Emmy: Nick, the last time we met you mentioned ‘shame’ in our podcast and you said that’s a whole other topic that could take up a whole podcast. And I not even sure what to ask about shame because I’m assuming from my perspective that my take on shame might be very different from a male’s take on shame. How do men feel shame, when? with their mother, their father, their spouse? How is it, I can only begin to imagine how it might be different from how I feel shame from people.
So I guess my question is what would you like to share with us today about shame?

Nick: Wow, that’s a big topic. I can talk about my experience with it, and what a confusing experience that was for me because I only started working, working healing shame, my own shame, just a few years ago, maybe six years ago.  

And, when I started working with it, the feeling I was having, I didn’t even know what it was. It was just a feeling of, just like black, like almost just like I was going to die kind of feeling. And it would get triggered around situations that I didn’t really understand, it would just come out of nowhere. 

Suddenly I’d be in this experience. And I learned that that type of shame is usually connected to real early experiences, like 0-4, 0-3, like really young where it’s just this thing that kind of eclipses the sun kind of experience.

And if we’re thinking in terms of trying to understand why a man might act a certain way in a certain situation, if they just shut down completely, and can’t talk or won’t talk and just retreat completely, there’s a good chance, that’s a likely explanation is that they’ve had their ‘shame’ button pushed. And that reference to that early shame might have gotten triggered. 

That certainly the case for me, for sure. And when I was first working on it…

there’s a big difference between that kind of shame and something that would come up later, like one of the big things that comes up that I’ve heard a lot about talking to men about this is: not knowing something, and feeling ashamed for not knowing it but feeling so ashamed that you don’t know about it that you can’t ask about it? 

And that that comes from this phenomenon of that is later in life that is more like an event, usually with Dad. Where, you’re expected to know something without being taught and you’re just expected to know and then you don’t do it right and you get a big bad reaction from an adult for not knowing something that you were never taught and that’s a real common phenomenon that I’ve heard a lot talking to men about this stuff. 

That expectation that you would know something having never been taught and then feeling a lot of shame about that. 

So, I kind of wandered around a little bit there. Those are the two main, big important places where shame comes up in my experience: that early shame that feels almost like an anti-life force and for example, being expected to know something, and not knowing it and feeling too ashamed to even ask. 

And then, where’s that going? That just gets locked in as forever: you don’t know, you can’t ask, you’ll never know. So, those are a couple of examples that come up real often.

Emmy: Is there more to say about the ‘dad’ piece here? You mentioned that this often comes from Dad where my impression from what you just said is Dad expects you to know something that Dad never taught you. Is that what you meant and if so, can you speak more to that?
 
 Nick: Yeah, so usually, in talking to men about this, that’s the origin of that. I don’t know what to call it, I guess I could call it a wound, I suppose, where there is some experience, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be “dad” or just an adult, usually an adult man, who either expects you to know something, is very impatient in teaching it to you if they even try to teach it to you and you have the experience of, a very confusing experience, of not understanding how you could possibly know what to do having never been taught and how you’ll ever learn; you’ve already messed up so bad, they’ve lost patience and they’re not even going to try to teach you. And that wound kind of just gets lock in, it just stops there. And there isn’t much communication of movement around that and then that wound can very easily be into adult life and crop up. 

There’s a similar situation where you’re somehow think you’re supposed to know something and you don’t and suddenly you in that really intense shame place and really intense confusion and so that can result in lashing out, shutting down. It can produce a result that cannot make any sense. If you’re observing this guy watching what he’s doing, you’re like, “What’s going on with that guy there? I don’t understand. Why did he get so mad, or why did he freak out that much over such a small thing or something that didn’t even appear to be a thing?” 

It could even just appear to be all internal and that trigger got hit for something you might not even notice had happened. So that can get confusing for people who are close to that person, to that man, that can get really confusing seeing these big reactions to tiny things or even indetectable things.

Heather: So, there’s the super primal shame and then there’s the incompetent and incompetency shame. Is there any window between those two moments where a boy is living in a world where he can make mistakes, where he is safe to not know, where he can ask questions, or does that second moment happen so early also that there’s no window such as that?

Nick: So, yeah, that’s an important distinction to make or question to ask. So, what this is derived from is how common that wound, that shame wound is for men, at least the men I’ve talked to about this. And so, that kind of being expected to know/not knowing, that’s something, if it comes up, everybody nods. Once I see that happening that way, it starts to feel like something… it’s not universal, it just seems to be so common how many men seemed to be carrying that wound. 

But something happening outside that phase, it’s not impossible, there’s lots of ‘yeah’, a huge range of possible experiences.

Sure, a great coach who is calm and patient and just says, “Hey, this is how you do it,” and takes the time to explain and is patient and has some humor with it, and explains with an outcome of success, instead of some other weird thing where it’s a lose/lose for the young person where no matter what they do, they lose. For sure, that’s certainly possible. It’s just the other way, where someone is carrying this wound, this really intense wound of expected to know and not knowing, is really prevalent. 

Heather: For some reason I have the idea of like a 9-year-old boy, I’m making that up, is that true or does that second type, does that start as early as the other one? I’m wondering if there’s some period in a boy’s time of life when he’s still young enough or something that people aren’t having that expectation or he’s not feeling that expectation to know because he’s young or whatever, and that there’s 

a developmental point where that starts to become a part of his experience. Or it’s not, if it’s just ‘yeah’ from time immemorial: I need to know but I can’t ask. 

Nick: That’s a good distinction, let me think about that. If I had to give it, put it at a developmental stage, I never thought of it that way, but I mean 9 does sound about right. The conversation about shame has so many facets to it, there are so many pieces to it, and I’m using this example because it came up, it came up first for me because it was so common. I have to think more about that, kind of like the 5-8 zone if that maybe has a different character to it, and maybe if there’s a little respite there. But we’re talking in real general terms. 

Everyone’s individual experience is different for sure. 

I’m not trying to describe kind of rules, it’s more just, ‘wow, does that ever come up a lot!’ Boy, everybody says, “Oh, yeah, THAT! Blahhh” If I had to put it, I’d say about 9, yeah, it seems like it, somehow, maybe on average, it would happen more often, or the expectations would change, something, I don’t know, yeah. 

Emmy: Can you, Nick please explain the reaction you described when you’re experiencing shame versus the similar reacting when a man is trying to maintain the system, the patriarchal system. 

Nick: Fantastic, yeah, I love that! I just have to listen to my radio here for a second (Laughs). 

I think there’s a lot of wounding that I think happens in the way that we raise boys, in my experience and this is my generation, how I grew up, what I observed and experienced myself. I’m 57, and that dates me, and I grew up in one place, and saw one set of things happening, so it was limited and subjective. 

I saw and experienced a lot of wounding going on of boys growing up, and the adult men in their world and some of it really bad. So, unless that pain is resolved somehow, or those wounds are addressed somehow, or attended to somehow, then those are carried. So, certainly my experience was, if that shame gets triggered, like the real overwhelming one or the more narrative shame, I guess what it’s called.

The overwhelming one doesn’t really have a story, it’s just like I feel “I’m going to die, I’m just done, I have to go lie down.” That’s the early shame non-narrative. 

Or the “I should know, and I don’t, what am I going to do?” That has more of a narrative story to it.  “Oh, I don’t know this thing, that’s really terrible, I don’t know how to get that information, so I’m just stuck.” 

And when I had that experience, then that’s just pain, so I would go into a really intense pain reaction, like shut down and potentially lash out. That wasn’t what I did, but that would be easy to do for someone who’s just kind of overwhelmed by this pain at that point. So something that would trigger that as an adult, they would go into just this pain reaction. 

There wouldn’t be, and I don’t know, I have to think of that, is that a by-product of, an accidental by-product of misogyny, or the misogyny programming, is that you have men that are just kind of hair-triggered, pain-bodied, you know they can just get triggered into this pain reaction really fast and just kind of get shut down. 

Is that an accident, or if that’s a by-product or if that’s part of it? I’d have to think about that. So, that’s a distinct thing; if that shame gets touched, then there’s no narrative of maintaining a social order. That’s just someone getting overwhelmed by pain, shutting down or lashing out. I don’t see a connection there. 

But if it’s something that the woman does that threatens that social order, and there’s a real strong lashing out with a certain purpose like some of the other things we’ve talked about in this podcast. 

That’s pretty different, I would say.  Energetically feeling that within me, that’s a real different energy, I mean, this, whatever it is, this shadow masculine programming, is really telling me to do things to maintain the order. 

But those shame reactions are just kind of overwhelm the system shut down reactions. So those feel different, within me they feel very different, energetically, I don’t think they’re connected.

Emmy: Just to clarify, though but the response seems similar, that’s kind of my question. I think energetically they are different, but the response can seem similar, true?

Nick: For sure. I mean, if you’re just observing this from the outside someone could lash out or clam up, I don’t know how you could tell those apart as an outside observer watching what someone is doing or even what they’re saying.

I don’t think you could tell them apart, unless, I mean there was definitely was a time when I couldn’t tell them apart with in me, for sure. 

It took a lot of teasing out to figure out even what shame was and what was going on with that and then this shadow masculine programming routine.

That took a lot to sort that out. So, yeah, it could look identical, it’d be really difficult to figure out what was going on there. 

Emmy: This is Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham with music by Lemon Music Studio from Pixabay, and with special thanks to our ‘dude’, Nick Oredson. 

This concludes Part 1 of Episode 2 of “Ask a Dude”.

Please join us for Part 2

Please visit our website at www.sacred-truths.com.

Thank you for listening.